By Jeremy Pemberton
When I was four months old, I was baptised in King’s College Chapel, Cambridge. So that really does make me a cradle Anglican. I was brought up to go to church, specifically to Choral Matins. All the worship of my childhood was the 1662 Book of Common Prayer, with hymns from Hymns Ancient & Modern or the English Hymnal.
I loved it. And even when I was bored or rebellious, its texts surrounded me and consoled me. As time went on, I was introduced to Series 2 and then Series 3, and by the time I was ordained in the early 1980s we were using the ASB1980 (alongside the BCP), supplanted at the turn of the century by the library we call Common Worship (which is the one thing it isn’t).
That liturgical metric of change was matched by a similar cultural transformation in the life of the church. From the sobriety of the 1950s and 1960s, the charismatic movement revolutionized the emotional temperature of English Anglicanism, matching the culture around. Alongside this have come other enormous alterations. The ministry of women, so controversial in its passage from 1987 (deacons) to 2014 (bishops), is now loved, received and thoroughly normal for most of the church. In social terms, the remarriage of divorced people has been, perhaps, the most significant change.
But while all of this might seem to indicate an institution full of life and liveliness, this catalogue of innovation has been matched by another inexorable reality, that since the 1960s the Church of England has been shrinking numerically. The decline has been steady, with some periods being worse than others (the pandemic was particularly damaging). The loss of people in the pews has also been matched by a loss of respect and affection for the national church in the population as a whole.
All kinds of initiatives have been tried to halt or even slow this steady collapse. The very uncomfortable truth is that not one of them has worked. This failure is not something that the central bodies of the Church like to examine too closely. Therefore, as a way of reflecting on a whole life in ministry I am doing just that and, in particular, looking at the ecclesiology of the responses to decline. Or, to put it another way, I am asking the question, “What have we believed about the nature of the church in the ways we have fought our decline?”
I am doing this work through the Lambeth Advanced Degrees in Theology, a remarkable small programme (thirty-five students are the most they accept), which marries M Phil and PhD students with suitable supervisors from universities all over the nation and beyond. It does not have its own library resources, and I am enormously grateful to James Woodward, who has given me Senior Scholar status at Sarum College, and Jayne Downey, who provides amazing support through the library. I have visited Sarum for the first time this year, and I hope to be back for a study week in the coming year.
Jeremy Pemberton is a retired priest living the diocese of Southwell & Nottingham. He has served in the dioceses of Durham, Ripon, Peterborough and Ely, as well as in the Anglican Church of Congo. He was an honorary canon of the cathedrals in Ely and Bunia dioceses.
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